Arc Tangent

A dis­cus­sion on the risks of human extinc­tion, and some mea­sures that can be taken to mit­i­gate it, aia Slash­dot (yeah, ew): http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2007_orig-articles/2007–10-15-reducingrisk.html

An amus­ing read, if a bit con­tentious in places. To quote:

There is cur­rently no inde­pen­dent body assess­ing the risks of high-​energy physics exper­i­ments. Pos­ner (2004) has rec­om­mended with­draw­ing fed­eral sup­port for such exper­i­ments because the ben­e­fits do not seem to be worth the risks.

Risks? What bloody risks? Any Many physi­cists can will tell you that the chances of a high-​energy exper­i­ment going pear-​shaped in a cat­a­strophic way (in a global sense) is so bloody minis­cule as to be next to impos­si­ble. If it was easy to destroy a planet, we’d see nature doing it a lot more often by pure ran­dom chance.

The rest of the arti­cle essen­tially boils down to an argu­ment that we should do our best to delay extinc­tion by colonis­ing space. I’m convinced!